Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Wrestling with God

In thanksgiving for the
life, ministry, and friendship of the Rev. Peg Beissert (1914-2013), a widow
who wrestled with “the powers that be” to bring justice to us all.

This
past Sunday I spoke to MCC Winston-Salem about the lectionary readings for the
day: the Genesis passage of Jacob wrestling with God and Jesus’ parable of the
widow wrestling with the unjust judge, wrestling with “the powers that be.” I’ve
decided to share a few of those thoughts with you…

As
a young boy, I have a fond memory wrestling with my dad. It was a friendly
competition. I felt his strength but it inflicted no pain, and we were usually
smiling through the whole wrestling match. It seemed a part of my brother’s and
my rite of passage into manhood, but it also brought us close to him, and the
physical intimacy felt good.

Slightly
older, I wrestled with my boyhood friend from church, again in a friendly
way—my idea. But I had to move into another room quickly because I was aroused
and didn’t want him to see. In high school, though I wanted to take a
weightlifting class, I didn’t, because it required wrestling, and I was afraid
my secret would come out in such close proximity to another teenage boy.

James
B. Nelson is one of the pioneer writers in body theology, a theology that
recognizes the body as a place where we may meet the holy, where we may
encounter God. There are dozens and dozens of body theologians now, many of
them women, from racial minorities, or LGBT. But Professor Nelson is a
straight, white male.

Nelson
writes that during one service of Holy Communion, he rose to go forward to
receive the consecrated bread and wine and realized to his consternation that
he was aroused. He uses this involuntary response to illustrate the continuity
of body and spirit, sexuality and spirituality. After all, eros, what I have
nicknamed “the urge to merge,” is the fuel that feeds both our sexual and
spiritual encounters, both lovemaking and prayermaking—we want to be one with
another, whether with a partner or with God. We want to hold on until they
bless us.

In
one of the workshops I led as part of an LGBTQ spirituality event during Winston-Salem’s
Pride weekend, I told the story (which has appeared in several of my books) of
a woman who once attended a “church and homosexuality” workshop I led years
ago. She had no religious background, she explained, but in her lovemaking with
her partner she had discovered a spiritual realm she had never before
experienced. “Since spirituality has to do with God,” she said, “I came here to
find out about God.”

Just
as I feared wrestling with my boyhood friend and teenage gym mates for fear of
getting aroused and my secret homosexuality known, many of us fear wrestling
with God as well as “the powers that be” because of the passions it arouses in
us and the intimacy involved. But God who wrestled mud into human flesh in our
creation and wrestled into human flesh in Jesus the Word made flesh badly,
passionately, wants to wrestle with us, much like my father did, not to hurt or
intimidate or frighten us, but to provide a safe intimacy and rite of passage
for our struggle into spiritual maturity, becoming compassionate as our God in
heaven is compassionate.

In
the children’s sermon I tried to convey that The Bible is full of stories of
people who wrestled with God, that church is full of people who wrestle with
one another to form spiritual community, and that prayer may serve as a kind of
wrestling venue.

Instead
of beginning “Let us pray…” perhaps we could say, in the famous words of one
wrestling announcer, “Let’s get ready to rummm-bllllle…!”

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ABOUT CHRIS...

Chris Glaser has a ministry of writing and speaking. Since graduation from Yale Divinity School in 1977, Chris has served in a variety of parish, campus, editorial, and interim posts. He has spoken to hundreds of congregations, campuses, and communities throughout the U.S. and Canada, and published a dozen best-selling books on spirituality, sexuality, vocation, contemplation, scripture, sacrament, theology, marriage, and death.